Former Chief Information Commissioners and several Right to Information (RTI) activists on Thursday sought the intervention of the President in ensuring the appointment of the CIC in the Central Information Commission without any further delay.
>The post has been lying vacant since August 22 and this has never happened for a day since the Commission was set up in 2005. The practise till now has been for the senior-most Information Commissioner to be appointed CIC and the announcement was in the past made before the post fell vacant.
The President was petitioned after a similar plea to the Prime Minister by the National Campaign for Peoples’ Right to Information on September 2 yielded no result. Citing Section 12 (4) of the RTI Act which states that the “general superintendence, direction and management of the affairs of the Commission shall vest in the CIC’’, the signatories to the petition said the vacancy has the “potential to adversely impact the effective functioning’’ of the Commission.
Asked about the delay in the appointment, Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions Jitendra Singh on Tuesday said it was in the process. Also, according to him, the Ministry was awaiting the Lok Sabha Secretariat’s opinion on the selection committees for the appointment of several such posts in the absence of a Leader of the Opposition (LoP).
However, the petitioners pointed out in the letters to both the President and the Prime Minister that the RTI Act clearly specifies that in the absence of a LoP, the leader of the single largest party in the Opposition in the Lok Sabha can be made a member of the committee to appoint the CIC.
According to the petition, there is already a huge backlog in the Commission with close to 25,000 appeals and complaints pending. “Often people have to wait for more than a year for their appeals and complaints to be heard. The lack of a Commissioner will cause the pendency in the Commission to further increase.’’
The signatories to the petition include former CICs Wajahat Habibullah and Deepak Sandhu, former Information Commissioner Sailesh Gandhi, besides RTI activists Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey, Anjali Bhardwaj, Venkatesh Nayak and Shekhar Singh.
